Slice of Life

Thursday

Mar 28, 2013 at 12:01 AMMar 28, 2013 at 11:16 AM

On a snowy “spring” Sunday afternoon, I began to read the story of an Amish Indiana woman’s life on a rural farm. Laborious chores like making and mending the family’s clothing, baking 18 pies for a church get together, and helping her husband butcher livestock at four o’clock in the morning, inspires me to take care of my relatively tiny family’s needs.

Julie Sal

On a snowy “spring” Sunday afternoon, I began to read the story of an Amish Indiana woman’s life on a rural farm. Laborious chores like making and mending the family’s clothing, baking 18 pies for a church get together, and helping her husband butcher livestock at four o’clock in the morning, inspires me to take care of my relatively tiny family’s needs.

Without washing machines, microwaves, or computers, she spends the bulk of her day in devotion to her family and God. As an “at home” mom, I have the benefit of electricity when performing my cleaning, cooking, not to mention a computer. After reading a few chapters, I began to feel quite lazy compared to the average Amish housewife. I try to make dinner five nights a week, but I’ve never butchered anything. I really try not to even touch raw meat and just picking out ground turkey can make me nauseous at times. The book chronicled the process of cleaning out the pig intestines in order to recycle them for making sausage for her family. I have made broth from a chicken carcass before but even that involved a crock pot — no messy intestines.

I doubt the Amish mother gets besieged with pleas for help in looking up Lego You Tube videos on her 9-year-olds’ Ipod while talking to her husband on the phone and trying to put something edible together. I know she would get frustrated like me when her full grown fingers type the wrong letters on the miniscule iPod keypad that is better suited in scale for the Keebler Elves. She of course wouldn’t be on a first name basis with the elves or know that the head baker is Ernie because she bakes all of her family’s cookies from scratch with ingredients that she bought in bulk and hauled home in her buggy.

I’ve been trying to eliminate artificial foods and genetically modified substances off of my grocery list. It’s been months since I’ve put anything with the Keebler Elves into my cart, but my boys certainly have let me know that they miss the snacks in wrappers. They aren’t by any means sitting around dipping carrots into hummus. Just getting one of them to eat vegetables involves bartering how many beans are allowed to be left on the plate.
The boys will be eating candy out of wrappers when they get their baskets Easter morning. There are even some carrot-shaped chocolates in there which I’m sure are just loaded with antioxidants. I’m just taking small steps in eliminating artificial food.

Taking the time to make everything from scratch is definitely more time consuming. Looking to the Amish cookbook for inspiration was not a wise move. It turns out that many of the Amish recipes call for cream of mushroom soup and that they fry quite a few things. In the vegetable chapter for instance, there is a recipe featuring fried cucumbers. If a vegetable is fried, doesn’t that defeat its purpose as a vegetable? The Amish seem to use up what they have and figure that it’s better to fry something up and enjoy it rather than it rotting in the icebox. They rationalize that they work hard during the day and need a huge meal to give them strength. I do not labor in a field all day, so I do not need the energizing powers of a cream of anything soup.

There are some surprising ethnic foods in the Amish cookbook like burritos with jalapenos (I thought they liked everything to be bland), and there was a promising looking pizza recipe. The sauce and crust were homemade with a variety of colorful chopped vegetables on top of farm fresh cheese. The final step in preparing the, up until then, average pizza, was pouring a can of cream of mushroom soup all over the top. We’ll just stick to our standard Friday pizza order. I do after all place a detailed order and then have to carry it out of the restaurant over icy sidewalks to haul home myself in my silver Honda buggy.